The Flower That Grew from Ashes novel Chapter 113

The sheer ruthlessness and toxicity of the act was absolutely sickening!

"Bullshit! It's all bullshit!"

Barnum finally lost all control. He shot up from his seat, pointing at Elias and roaring in desperate fury.

"You ungrateful bastard! You've been brainwashed by outsiders! Someone is trying to turn us against each other!"

Elias didn't even blink.

His face perfectly blank, he simply flipped to the second page of the report.

"The company that forged my death certificate and managed the subsequent intelligence blackout was registered right here in Cresthaven. It's called 'Apex Business Consulting'."

In the crowd, Annelise felt her heart skip a beat.

Just as she thought.

That was the root of it all.

Elias's voice kept slicing through the tension like a merciless scalpel.

"The legal representative of this company is a nobody with zero ties to our family. But its actual controller, the man managing every single financial transaction, points back to one person."

His gaze slowly shifted to the most inconspicuous corner of the room, where a man had been trying to shrink into the shadows.

"Felix."

He called out the name.

The old butler, who had shadowed Barnum for thirty years with a perpetual poker face, violently shuddered the moment he heard his name.

He jerked his head up, his usually stoic features contorting into sheer terror for the first time.

"And you, Felix, only take direct orders from one man. My father, Barnum."

Elias's eyes returned to Barnum's drained, bloodless face.

"Father, do you need me to keep reading?"

Dead silence.

If the affair had merely embarrassed the family, then Barnum's plot to murder his own son for a corporate bailout had just completely stripped the Lehman family naked in front of Cresthaven's entire elite circle.

"Tell me, how exactly are we going to settle this?"

Barnum's lips quivered violently, but he couldn't form a single word.

Elias didn't spare him another glance. He straightened up and turned around. His sharp, icy gaze cut through the chaotic crowd, landing flawlessly on the woman he had shielded earlier—the one who had remained as quiet as a spectator this entire time.

His voice returned to a volume the whole room could hear, crisp and powerful.

"Annelise, do you have anything you want to say to them?"

Instantly, over three hundred pairs of eyes—brimming with shock, curiosity, and twisted excitement—snapped toward Annelise.

The woman who had just had her back whipped open, her blood still seeping through her dress.

The woman everyone assumed was just a pathetic, discarded casualty of high society.

Annelise slowly straightened her spine, which had been slightly hunched from the agonizing pain.

She lifted her gaze, meeting the eyes of the entire crowd.